Why are some brains more easily gripped by ideological doctrines than others? An emerging research program on the psychological underpinnings of ideological thinking suggests that domain-general individual differences in perception, cognition, and personality can predict people’s ideological orientations. Traditionally, the relationship between ideological attitudes and psychological attributes was primarily assessed in the domains of cognitive ability, self-reported cognitive style, or the Big Five personality attributes. Yet a new wave of cognitive and computational research indicates that the tools of cognitive psychology and neuroscience can be harnessed to measure a wider range of individual differences, including cognitive and perceptual traits on flexibility, caution, inhibition, working memory, and sensory evidence accumulation. This review systematically synthesizes theory-driven and data-driven research on the psychological profiles of ideological worldviews including ideological extremism, dogmatism, political conservatism, nationalism, patriotism, religiosity, authoritarianism, system justification, and social dominance orientation. Summaries of the individual-level cognitive and personality predictors of over a dozen ideological orientations are outlined, and core psychological similarities and differences between these ideologies are compared and discussed. The review depicts subtle nuances between the psychological profiles of interrelated ideologies as well as common cognitive, affective, and personality signatures that underpin ideological thinking regardless of the mission of the ideology. The findings illustrate that individual differences in low-level psychophysical perceptual traits shape the dogmatism, extremity, and substance of individuals’ ideological beliefs. Addressing pertinent debates in the field, the results depict clear differences in the psychological profiles of dogmatic and conservative ideologies. Consequently, expanding the conceptual and methodological vocabulary with which cognitive dispositions are linked to ideological worldviews is a critical step in widening and deepening our theories on the origins and consequences of ideological thinking – as well as what makes some minds particularly susceptible to adopting particular ideologies.